Between a Historic Milestone and the Horror of History / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Raul Castro tries to raise Barack Obama’s arm in a “shared victory” salute. Obama’s not having it. Havana, March 2016.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, 21 March 2016 – A “historic milestone”: This is what Americans call President Obama’s visit to the Cuba of Fidel and Raul Castro. That is, the Cuba that has not had a legitimate president for 64 years. And a Cuba that is of the caste of children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren, all named Castro. All of them visible in the neo-Castro selfies, holding key positions in the military-corporate apparatus of the State, looking ahead to the dynastic succession announced for 2018.

The American subculture of spectacles obliges them to invent “historic milestones” of all kinds. Bored to the point of catharsis with the surrealistic encounter with a democratically elected African-American and an octogenarian general with bloodstained hands.

The White House has specialized in supporting the bloodiest Latin American caudillos: Batista, Trujillo, Ríos Montt, Somoza, Stroessner, Pinochet and a chilling et cetera that culminates with the Clan Castro. The “novelistic” dictator in our hemisphere is in debt to the powerful in Washington, who applaud and abandon the satraps in their own backyard according to the profits in play.

But let’s not be unfair to the Obamacracy: The Cuban Castrocracy has also been blessed by a record three Catholic popes and one Orthodox one, by the populist saints of our region, by American academia with its Revolutionary Oedipus Complex, and by European governments pressured by left-wing intellectuals and right-wing business interests.

Kind-hearted Obama arrives at the last surviving Revolution Theme Park in the Global Marketozoica Era. To exempt him from a mea culpa, he arrives spurred on by the misery of the Cuban exile millionaires, desperate to divide up among themselves the ruins of the island, while some even dream of their own candidacy for parliament or president, ready to return to the homeland the first second Raulpolitik that is declared to be in pseudo-democratic retreat.

Thus, the proletarian Utopia turns into State Capitalism. With the added value of a Communist Party that, according to the Constitution, is the only legal party in Cuba, the character of whose social system is enshrined in the Constitution as “irreversible” in perpetuity. Neither at the ballot box or at the barrel of a gun.

For this Castroism had to assassinate Oswaldo Payá on 22 July 2012, the Cuban opposition figure with the greatest moral authority and popular base, and the first to win the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought for his citizens’ initiative known as the Varela Projects, an authentic alternative for the transition to democracy, unlike the Raulist reforms which confer privileges and concessions from a power that consults no one but itself, and that does not restore and of the rights hijacked from the Cuban people.

An Obama eager to justify his aprioristic Nobel Peace Prize, and a Europe demoralized among immigrants and radicalism, Cuban State Security hired cheap labor to do its dirty work, because the olive-green executioners knew that such an extrajudicial execution would be contrary to the passive complacency and the non-passive complicity of the free world.

And so Rosa María Payá, the martyr’s young daughter, who today is leading the worldwide campaign “Cuba Decides” for the realization of a plebiscite on the island, was coerced by John Kerry’s spokesman at the State Department on 20 July 2015, so that she could not ask even one question of the Cuban foreign minister then present in the United States, after the opening of the Cuban embassy in Washington.

Now we will see if Barack Obama, who will meet with a dozen dissidents in Cuba, has sufficient sovereignty to look Rosa María Payá in the face and mention in public the name of her father, Oswaldo Payá, honoring the memory of this Cuban who belonged to the future. Should he not dare to do so, the visit of the American president to Cuban could be a “historic milestone,” yes, but of a past of horror.

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